ITI Articles

Rainbow’s End, the iconic South Auckland Theme Park, has been utilising the creative nous and know-how of Media Design School Diploma of Graphic Design and Diploma of Digital Media students of late, with both projects providing the client with pleasing results.

Rainbow’s End Marketing Manager Reggie Singh approached the school looking for a fresh take more akin to the theme park’s target audience for a Rainbow’s End billboard project in Manukau. Graphic design students undertook the project as part of their Studio Week, a week-long client brief that forms an integral part of the course.

Breaking into groups with assigned roles (project manager, art director, graphic designer and mac operator), the students had to research, conceptualise, design and present a billboard in the space of one week. The final project presented a number of challenges for the successful group, including working with extremely large files for outdoor advertising and negotiating sign-offs via a committee of stakeholders at Rainbows End. Rommel Lajom from the February 2008 intake was chosen by Rainbow’s End to take the design forward to a final billboard.

The outcome of the Diploma of Graphic Design project led onto a further collaboration with MDS, the second installment saw Diploma of Digital Media students create a brand new website for Rainbow’s End.

Mason Herber, Course Leader for the Diploma of Digital Media, explains further: “We had the class split into four groups for this project. Each group had a project manager, designer, html and css designer, and a flash designer/developer. The group that was chosen as the client’s favourite went on to build this in PHP and MySQL. It was an interesting challenge which involved almost all of the disciplines that we teach through out the course.”

The final result of the project will see the student-designed website go live. Mason continues: “The students have an ongoing contract with the client, who is so impressed he also wants to hire them for some other projects.”